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This is not directly related, but Stan Goodenough’s latest editorial comes to mind, link is

http://www.stangoodenough.com/?p=152

Excerpt:

When Churchill wept
Posted on Tuesday 5 August 2008
Immoral then; it is indefensibly immoral now…

Kasejovice, Czech Republic – The border with Germany is 45 km west – and the Sudetenland just a few minutes’ drive – from my father-in-law’s small holding where my family and I are savoring the summer.

Forests cover this corner of the Czech Republic. In the tiny villages that dot the dales and straddle the hills, the snail’s pace of life appears untouched by 21st Century modernity.

Bohemia is so undisturbed that it is difficult to envisage a more peaceful place. How much harder to imagine that 70 years ago next month, this tranquil territory was hand-fed to Hitler – an appeasement sacrifice that only served to whet his desire for more.

The shocking history is well-known: How the fearful Great Powers threw their trusting friends to the wolves rather than face down the belligerent who was out to devour them all.

In an attempt to placate the strident demands of the Sudeten Germans – who were being goaded by Hitler into seeking secession to Germany – Czech President Edvard Beneš had offered them a literal blank check: an empty sheet of paper on which they could list their demands, all of which he promised to grant if they would just end their provocations.

But the page came back empty. Peace was not in Hitler’s mind.

Meeting him in Munich on September 29, 1938 – while barring governmental representatives from Prague – the leaders of England and France took it upon themselves to “give” Germany the Sudetenland – the high ground encircling Czechoslovakia on which stood the virtually impenetrable fortifications essential to the security of that country.

More than “just territory,” what the Munich Dictate (or Agreement) gave to the Nazis – as British diplomat Harold Nicolson observed at the time – was “the whole key to Europe.”

Winston Churchill was vehemently opposed to Hitler’s possessing “the mountain defense line which marks the ancient boundaries of Bohemia and was specially preserved to the Czechoslovak state as a safeguard of its national existence.”

On hearing of the fait accompli Churchill wept, then furiously denounced Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s actions as “sordid, subhuman and suicidal.” It was, he thundered, “the grossest act of bullying treachery” that amounted to not only the sacrifice of England’s honor but the resulting “sacrifice of lives—our people’s lives.”

Forty-eight hours after hosting Chamberlain, the Nazi leader ordered his forces into the abandoned land. Czechoslovakia lay ripe for the picking and, within months, the fuehrer would swallow it whole.

Instead of securing “peace for our time” (Chamberlain’s ostentatious assertion upon returning from Munich), the sacrifice of the Sudetenland toppled the world into war. With Prague in his pocket, Hitler threatened, then invaded, Poland.

Adding shame to shame, Chamberlain fished around desperately for an excuse, any excuse, not to come to Poland’s aid as a British-French-Polish treaty committed him to.

While he dilly-dallied, two million German troops smashed into the country, the Luftwaffe poured its bombs onto Warsaw, and panzers sliced up the Polish countryside. Tens of thousands were slaughtered in the blitzkrieg.

Trying to express his devastation and embarrassment to Polish Ambassador Edward Raczynski, a helpless Churchill (he was not yet prime minister) falteringly hoped “that Britain will keep…will keep its…”

Voice breaking, he began to cry. Britannia would no longer rule the waves.

End of excerpt

http://www.stangoodenough.com/?p=152